{
  "id": "pane-relacion-de-las-antiguedades-de-los-indios",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Fray Ramon Pane's Relacion de las antiguedades de los indios (c. 1498)",
  "summary": "The earliest surviving description of an American people written by a European, made on Hispaniola in the 1490s by a Hieronymite hermit ordered to learn the language. It preserves Taino cosmology by name, and survives only inside the biography of Columbus written by his son, as a single chapter. What makes it usable as evidence is that the friar keeps saying what he does not know — and, on the same pages, that the mission needs force and punishment and that the first man he baptised was killed.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "hispaniola",
    "caribbean",
    "ethnography",
    "anthropology",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "language",
    "religion",
    "chronicles",
    "method",
    "fifteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "landa-relacion-de-las-cosas-de-yucatan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sahagun-relacion-del-autor"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "oviedo-historia-general-y-natural-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "obras-perdidas-de-lenguas-indigenas-de-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "garcia-origen-de-los-indios-1607"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "preguntas-del-cacique-nicaragua"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Fray Ramon Pane and what did he write?",
    "What is the earliest European ethnography of the Americas?",
    "What do we know about Taino religion and where does the knowledge come from?",
    "How reliable is Pane's account of the Taino?",
    "Who were the first people baptised in the Americas and what happened to them?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The piece announces itself as commissioned fieldwork in a language the writer had been sent to learn, and the heading says so before the text begins. In the 1892 Madrid printing the section is headed \"ESCRITURA DE FRAY ROMAN (PANE) DEL ORDEN DE SAN GERONIMO\", under the rubric \"De la antiguedad de los indios, la cual, como sujeto que sabe su lengua, recogio con diligencia, de orden del Almirante.\" The friar's own first sentence repeats the commission: \"Yo, Fr. Roman, pobre Heremita del Orden de San Geronimo, escribo lo que he podido entender y saber de la creencia e idolatria de los indios, y como observaban sus Dioses, de orden del ilustre senor el Almirante, virey y gobernador de las islas, y tierra firme de las Indias, de lo cual tratare en la presente escritura.\" A European official ordered a description of a New World people's religion, and assigned it to a man qualified by knowing the language rather than by rank.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The second thing he does is fence off what he is entitled to say, which is the move that makes the document evidence rather than rumour. After naming the supreme being \"Jocabunagus maorocon\" and the five names of his mother — \"Atubei, Jemao, Guacar, Apito e Zuimaco, que son cinco nombres\" — he adds: \"Estos de que yo escribo, son de la isla Espanola, porque de las otras islas no se cosa alguna, por no haberlas visto jamas.\" The limit is geographic and it is stated as a limit of his own seeing. He closes the same paragraph with a judgment on how the beliefs are transmitted: \"todo esto les han hecho creer sus pasados, porque ellos no saben leer ni contar, sino hasta diez.\"",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "What the text preserves is a cosmology recorded with its proper names, and almost nothing else preserves it. Chapter I, \"De que parte vinieron los indios, y de que modo\", places the origin of the island's people in a province called Caanan, in a mountain called Canta, \"donde hay dos cuevas llamada la una Cacibagiagua y Amaiauba la otra. De Cacibagiagua salio la mayor parte de la gente que poblo la isla\", with a watchman named Marocael who failed to be at the door one day and was caught by the sun. Later chapters give the sun and moon coming out of a cave called Jovovava in the land of a cacique Maucia Tibuel, painted inside \"de follajes, y cosas semejantes, sin figuras\", holding two stone cemies \"del tamano de medio brazo, y parecia que sudaban\", called Boiniael and Maroyo, visited for rain. Chapter XII names the country of the dead: \"Creen que hay un lugar a donde van los muertos, que se llama Coaibai, y esta en la misma isla, a la parte que llaman Soraya\", whose first inhabitant and lord was \"Machetaurie-Guanana\".",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The friar records what he cannot follow as unfollowed, and that is rare enough in the genre to be worth quoting. Telling the episode of Caracaracol, struck on the back with a gourd of cogioba by Baiamanicoel, whose swelling grew until his brothers opened it with a flint axe and \"salio fuera una tortuga viva, y asi fabricaron su casa y llevaron a ella la tortuga\", he stops and writes: \"de esto no he sabido mas, y para entenderlo, ayuda poco lo que hemos escrito.\" In the second volume, listing the shapes of the stone cemies, he does the same with an object rather than a story: some \"tienen seis o siete puntas, que no se a que compararlas, por no haber visto una semejante a ellas en Espana ni en otra parte.\" Two admissions of failure, one of comprehension and one of comparison, inside a report written for the man who had sent him.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1",
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t2"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "He also describes a drug and a medical practice in enough detail to be checked. The cogioba \"es cierto polvo que toman algunas veces para purgarse, y otros efectos\"; it is taken \"con una cana larga como medio brazo, y meten un extremo en la nariz y otro en el polvo, y asi la sorben por la nariz, lo cual los hace purgar grandemente\"; and under it \"les parece que ven las casas vueltas de arriba a abajo, y que los hombres andan con la cabeza, los pies hacia el cielo.\" The same powder is given to the cemies of stone and wood and to the dead. The practitioner is named: the Buhitihu, who cuts the nails and the hair of the forehead of a corpse, grinds them between two stones with the juice of a herb and makes the dead drink it, \"preguntandole si el medico ocasiono su muerte, y si guardo la dieta\", until the dead answers.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1",
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t2"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The same document that preserves the religion is a document for suppressing it, and both halves are printed on the same pages. The Admiral's own words, quoted immediately before the friar's text, describe the cemi house and the cane and then read the whole thing as a fraud worked by rulers on subjects — \"creian que el que hablaba alli era el Cemi, y todos en general eran los enganados, excepto el Cacique, que era el que sabia y encubria su falsa credulidad por medio de cuya traza sacaba a aquellos pueblos todos los tributos que le parecia\" — and record the removal of the objects themselves: of the three stones most caciques keep, one for the crops, one so that women give birth without pain and one for water and sun, \"envie a Vuestras Altezas tres de estas piedras con Antonio de Torres, y llevare otras tres.\" The earliest ethnography of the Americas and the earliest shipment of confiscated American sacred objects are in the same sentence.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Pane names the first Christians of the island and then records that they were killed. The first to be baptised in the Espanola \"fue Juan Mateo, que se bautizo el dia del evangelista San Mateo, del ano 1496, y despues toda su casa\" — the household of Ganauvariu, \"en cuya casa habia diecisiete personas, que todas se bautizaron\". A few pages earlier the subjects of Guarionex, having plotted to kill the Christians on a tribute day and been arrested, \"perseveraron en el mismo proposito, dando muerte a cuatro hombres y a Juan Mateo y Antonio, su hermano, los cuales habian sido bautizados, y despues fueron donde estaban las imagenes y las hicieron pedazos.\" The mission described in this text is not a success story and its author does not present it as one.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t2"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The cost is stated by the friar in his own voice, and any account that quotes his ethnography without it is quoting half a document. Explaining why some converts fell away — \"no todos somos de una misma naturaleza\", some \"suelen empezar bien y despues se burlan de lo que les han ensenado\" — he draws the conclusion plainly: \"por lo cual se necesita de fuerza y de castigo.\" He repeats it as a request for men: \"es cierto que la isla tiene gran necesidad de gente para castigar los senores que no quieren entrar\" into the faith. On the same page he reports as a miracle that in the ground where the smashed images had been buried two or three agi roots had grown \"en forma de cruz\", and that the one who found it was the mother of Guarionex, \"que era la peor mujer que yo conoci en aquellas partes.\"",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t2"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "He ends by disclaiming any interest in the outcome, and the printer marks the end as the work of a named man. The last paragraph reads: \"Esto es lo que yo he podido comprender y saber acerca de las costumbres y ritos de los indios de la Espanola, por la diligencia de que he usado, por lo cual no pretendo ninguna utilidad espiritual o temporal; plegue a Dios nuestro Senor que si esto es para su servicio, me de gracia para poder perseverar, y si no me quite el entendimiento.\" Under it stands the colophon: \"FIN DE LA OBRA DEL POBRE HEREMITA FR. ROMAN PANE.\" The following page opens \"CAPITULO LXII\", which shows what the Relacion is bibliographically: not a book that survived, but one chapter inside somebody else's book.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t2"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What this reading cannot establish should be said plainly, because it decides the tier. The text was read here only in the Madrid 1892 printing, whose own ADVERTENCIA states that the preliminaries \"que ha de llevar esta obra\" were not ready and are deferred to tomo VI of the collection, and which announces that it means to prove \"sin dejar lugar a dudas (contra lo que escribio cierto americanista celebre)\" that the book carrying the Relacion was written by Fernando Colon. So the edition itself records that the authorship of its vehicle was contested when it went to press, and it supplies, in what was opened here, no account of how the friar's words descend to this page: no manuscript, no earlier printing, no statement of the language they passed through. Nothing read here dates the composition, gives the friar's origin, or corroborates a single Taino name from a second witness. This entry therefore quotes the 1892 text as what it is — the vehicle in which the Relacion survives — and claims nothing about the wording of a lost original.",
      "sources": [
        "colon-historia-del-almirante-1892-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "In English, Pane is normally met as a sentence — \"the first ethnography of the Americas\" — attached to a two-line summary of Taino myth, in a survey that has not opened the text and cannot say where the text is. The text is in full view and it is not where a reader would look: it is chapter LXI of the biography of Columbus by his son, split across two volumes of an 1892 Madrid collection, ending at page 302 of one and resuming at page 5 of the next, with no search layer, so it has to be walked to. This entry walks it and prints what is actually there: the commission and the language qualification in the heading, the five names of the mother of the supreme being, the two caves, the cave of the sun and moon with its two sweating stones, Coaibai and its lord, the cogioba cane and what it does, the Buhitihu interrogating a corpse — and then, in the friar's own voice and on the same pages, the sentence that the work needs \"fuerza y castigo\", the request for men to punish the lords who will not come in, and the murder of Juan Mateo, the first man baptised on the island, with his brother. It also prints the Admiral's reading of the whole religion as a caciques' tax fraud and his note that he shipped three of the sacred stones to the Catholic Monarchs. The result is the document entire — the founding act of American ethnography and the record of what that act was for — with the edition's own admission that its authorship was disputed standing where a claim about the lost original would otherwise go.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-19",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pane-relacion-de-las-antiguedades-de-los-indios",
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    "name": "Fray Ramon Pane's Relacion de las antiguedades de los indios (c. 1498)",
    "description": "The earliest surviving description of an American people written by a European, made on Hispaniola in the 1490s by a Hieronymite hermit ordered to learn the language. It preserves Taino cosmology by name, and survives only inside the biography of Columbus written by his son, as a single chapter. What makes it usable as evidence is that the friar keeps saying what he does not know — and, on the same pages, that the mission needs force and punishment and that the first man he baptised was killed.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pane-relacion-de-las-antiguedades-de-los-indios",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-19",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia del Almirante Don Cristobal Colon, en la cual se da particular y verdadera relacion de su vida y de sus hechos, y del descubrimiento de las Indias Occidentales, llamadas Nuevo-Mundo, escrita por Don Fernando Colon, su hijo — primer volumen, containing the opening of the Escritura de Fray Roman (Pane)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=1FxbAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA281"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia del Almirante Don Cristobal Colon ... escrita por Don Fernando Colon, su hijo — segundo volumen, containing the close of the Escritura de Fray Roman (Pane)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=iEQOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA19"
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Fray Ramon Pane's Relacion de las antiguedades de los indios (c. 1498)"
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}